kissing cousins
by verity candor
Summary: Or, The Cousincest Collection. Exactly what it says on the tin. NextGen. Complete. Winner for Best Drabble Collection at The 2012-2013 Couture Awards.
1. dominiquelily

_kissing cousins  
><em>

The adage goes: _Opposites attract._

It's a lie.

Lily blazes, Dom burns, and they collide, like stars, like constellations in someone else's sky, like fingers of flame reaching out for each other.

All that screaming, all that fighting, all of the noise about

"You stole him."

"You took him first."

"You are so mean."

"You are _so_ mature."

Dom is older, she should know better – Lily is younger, shouldn't she be innocent?

But, oh, that heat – oh, those delicious licks of flame, like trembling drops of sweat down their spine.

All of that fire, they crumple it away like dirty paper, unwrapped and stained. All of that heat - They burn it all away.


	2. louismolly

_kissing cousins  
><em>

Louis is thirteen, and Molly is beautiful.

She's married, three months pregnant, she's sneaking a cigarette (or three) on the back porch, and Louis knows he should tell her off or yell for Lysander, or call for his grandmum, or, or – well, do anything, really, but crouch here, mesmerized by the curve of her pale throat, half in shadow, half in the kitchen's dull light as she sucks on the cigarette, by the flash of brightest blue when her eye catches the light, the way her pointed, elegant profile swims in and out of the smoke she slowly breathes out.

He's filled with a sudden achy, sadness, because here she is, the most beautiful woman he's ever seen in his life, and Louis has to sneak behind the back of the Burrow to even think it, has to hide behind thick, dark foliage to even look.


	3. albusdominique

_kissing cousins  
><em>

Dominique has never known when to stop.

She sits – sprawls, really – on the bed, hair twined into a wild, golden halo, blue robe open, covering _almost _nothing, one hand bent with the artless grace that makes Al's heart skip (_just _a little unsteadily).

"Go on, then," she whispers breathily, and if her smirk wasn't so sly, so knowing, Al might be able to convince himself that he isn't short of breath, that his heartbeat isn't stuttering to a halt.

"Can't you fucking let it go?" he hisses, looking away. Neither of them is sure what he's talking about – the pointed looks she's been shooting at him for three weeks, the fierce kiss he finally pressed to her mouth two days ago. "Can't you just - "

"No." Her eyes are steady, her gaze catching on the rim of his ear, the ridge of his cheekbone.

Al turns back guiltily, almost unwillingly, taking in the the careless, unfamiliar weight of her presence on his blue sheets.

Dominique has never known when to stop.

Al has never known how.


	4. hugoroxanne

_kissing cousins  
><em>

She kisses him in a cloud of flour.

There are buns baking merrily in the oven and some sort of roast sitting on the table. Hugo is wrist-deep in cookie dough, and Roxanne's mouth tastes like a mistake.

"I- I don't – I don't even - " He stammers.

"I like girls." she tells him flatly. "And I know you don't – I know that –" she sighs.

"I was hoping." she says, and looks up at him.

"I thought you would... understand."

Hugo might not like girls, but he knows about hoping.

He leans up to kiss her on the cheek and when she reaches for the roast, he takes her hand.


	5. fredrose

for aimy and pearl

* * *

><p><em>kissing cousins<em>

They tend to sit too long on the rooftops.

Like all quiet people, their rebellions are a symphony of actions, silent gestures spelling their names out against a cloudy sky.

Rose wears a ribbon in her hair - silver&green, for Slytherin.

Fred blows things up in the kitchen sink - bright-red explosions, liquid against the windowpane.

They tend to sit too long on rooftops.

Rose might say it's because there is so much sky out there, so much that it looks like it's reaching out to swallow the ground, an enormous, starving mouth from another world, with hazy plumes of chimney-smoke for its tongue.

Fred might say he just likes to stargaze.

Mostly, they lean against the shingles and watch nighttime blossom in inky spirals on the horizon.

Tonight, though, Rose runs a thoughtful hand down Fred's nose.

"You are my sweetest downfall." She tells him.

"That sounds like a song." He tells her, catching her hand when it begins to trail down, ever lower.

"It is." She responds.

When the lights go on downstairs, Fred leaves a path of velvet kisses down her arm.


	6. jamesvictoire

for heather

* * *

><p><em>kissing cousins<em>

She calls him Jamie, and no one else does.

She is (still) the closest to France of all her siblings, but James is the only one, leaning drowsily against her knees, to hear the thin trickle of her mother's language through her teeth, throaty and heavy and harsh.

He doesn't understand what it means, the way her cold eyes fill with starshine when he walks by, the way she sometimes forgets where she is and watches him too closely, the way her hand tightens around his shoulder when he kisses her on the cheek.

All James really understands is that she listens, is that she _cares_, is that she is gentle and loving and heartbreakingly beautiful, and that she will never, never be his.


	7. lucylouis

for hadley - as promised, the longest drabble ever. also, i really fail at this pairing. sorry.

* * *

><p><em>kissing cousins<em>

"but tell me now, where was my fault  
>in loving you with all my heart"<br>-white blank page, mumford&sons

He leaves.

That's their story really.

He looks at her, he lets out a shallow breath and he walks away.

Lucy's left with all the lonely things that are left in empty houses - unwashed tea kettles, dirty dishes, clothes hung in the closet and melancholy whispers that hang in the corners and tangle in her hair like cobwebs.

Sometimes she turns with an unexpected smile, expecting to see him lounging by the door, all casual beauty and innocent eyes and summer in his smile, to find only hazy, grey cloudlight from the evening.

Nostalgia is a subtle, sly thing - it peers in the windows and raps on the door, sneaks into to fill the empty space in the bed and hides right under her chest where her breath comes in.

_Louis snapping pictures of flowers, of tiny things, growing things, blooming and fresh in her musty cabin, peering close through his bug-eyed lens, just inches from her  
><em>

_The house, her hideaway, covered in his sometimes surprisingly, sometimes unpleasantly, still pictures - Muggle pictures - like dead things, lacewings on the wall_

_The one day, the single time he turned perfectly__, leaning close to capture her eyes in his one-eyed lens __and how she couldn't resist leaning forward __while rain fell outside__ and they were curled up near the fire__, how she pushed his camera away from his face and touched the hair that curled around his ears and how he didn't move when he should have but just sat there and how she brushed the hair away from his face and leaned down, down - _

The pictures fall off of his wall, swinging drunkenly before they swoon to the ground.

Lucy sits with her legs crossed beneath her, clutching his dirty cup and watching the door never open._  
><em>


	8. albusroxanne

for vanity sinning - this took a _ridiculously_ long time. i'm sorry.

* * *

><p><em>kissing cousins<em>

"and i don't want to mess this thing up  
>i don't want to push too far"<br>-just a kiss, lady antebellum

If Al knew how to write poetry, he would write odes to her hair.

The tangle and the swirl of it, black against her coffee-cream throat, like a charcoal smear on an aged canvas.

The way it shields the furious passion in her eyes while she is bent over a textbook, how a ray from the sunset gets caught and shatters in the maze of her curls.

He could write about the siren song of her eyes, or the way she lets him throw an arm around her shoulder when she needs to laugh.

But he doesn't.

He smiles at his feet and shuts his eyes and pretends there's nothing but their breath between his lips and hers.


	9. jamesdominique

for munchkin/bethie - as your actual present is in limbo

* * *

><p><em>kissing cousins<em>

They tumbled into the closet, James reaching back to shut it as Dom stifled a laugh in his shoulder. They were both sixteen, brightly young in a haze of rebellion and lust and raw, sparking heat.

"Feeling clever, Weasley?" James whispered, slipping an arm around her waist.

"I should." Dominique whispered, fiercely, allowing him press his fingers against her hip. "My prank."

"_I _pulled it off." James said, baiting her.

Dom slapped him lightly on the chest, hiding a grin, "Cum on my tits, you wanker."

"My pleasure." James leaned forward, leering flirtatiously.

"Get off." Dominique hissed, pushing him back "Someone'll find us." She smirked as she said it, a smile belying her words.

"Fuck them." James murmured throatily. "And fuck-" he added, leaning close to nip at her ear, one hand slipping slyly against her waistband,

"-you."


	10. rosejames

for dri-bee and janey - now stop bugging me. /luffyoureally :P

* * *

><p><em>kissing cousins<em>

They fall together as easily as salt and pepper, sunshine and rain, speech and the breath around it.

They could measure it in snapshots, in moments, in the way their brown eyes sparkle or the way, at twelve, Rosie decides the gilded copper-red of her hair matches James'.

It's just that old, just that weatherbeaten, just that warm and comfortable, so that by the time James' casual peck-on-the-cheek slips that stunned half-inch too close to her mouth, it's nothing but a tingling, worn itch between his shoulderblades.

It's the magic of three words from him winning Rose away from her books, of how a raised eyebrow and a hinted 'why?' can halt his frenzied thrum cold, how casual banter and two cups of Rose's white ginger tea once a week can tide them over forever.

Even the rest of the world is too small to bridge the gap between their eyes, and there is something like the whiff of an eternal summer in the way they touch.

Maybe they complete each other; maybe they don't. Maybe they make sense; maybe they don't. Maybe they just fall into a pattern so deeply engraved into their skin that it makes everything else seem like noise.


	11. jamesroxanne

_kissing cousins_

"but i'm a broken promise in a pawn shop,  
>and this is just a secret that happens to involve you."<br>-another long night in the office of dreams, jeffrey mcdaniel

For three days after her engagement, she wears a smile that beams through concrete and window treatments and the glass of his windowpane and shimmers against his breastbone.

(The first time he kissed her, she kissed him back.

The second time, she let him kiss her.

The third time, she turned the copper-and-brass of her mouth away.

"I never have, James - it was never you."

His casual dismissal is paper thin as parchment.

"Well, fuck it all, Rox. Did you think I meant it? We're cousins, you _pervert_.")

He smiles, all his teeth bared, and the sun catches at them like it's hooked by the shadows beneath.


	12. mollyvictoire

_kissing cousins_

It's got something to do with the insouciant line of her mouth, something about that smirking curve of pale pink and shadowed, dusky rose that makes Teddy follow every movement of Molly's long legs as they walk away.

Victoire does too, but it's only (_only_) to figure out why the sight of her cousin's pale skin and dark hair inspire such frothing, bubbling rage in her.

Maybe it's the casual triangle between her bent wrist and her bare back, the tarnished smoke rings slipping from that pretty pout - She wonders if Teddy's looking, and writes off the sudden shiver in her shoulders to jealousy.

Maybe it's because Victoire's never felt ugly before, and, perhaps, if that rust-red resentment wasn't compelling her so painfully towards hatred, she would find herself surfacing in every errant, wandering freckle on her beautiful cousin's back.


	13. lilyrose

_kissing cousins_

"lily has a rose  
>no rose i've<br>and losing's less than winning(but  
>love is more than love)"<br>lily has a rose, ee cummings

People say they could almost be sisters; their pale, slight faces, and the parodic half-curves of their smiles - and in summer, when the sunlight steals back the nut-brown sheen in Rose's hair and erases Lily's hard won half-inch, they could be even more than that.

They move like identical, red-haired flickers of candlelight, and lost somewhere between them is a light-haired boy (a candle's wick, shall we say?) who they dance toward and away from, who is never asked to choose, because the choice is already made, a poor, little blue-eyed boy who is finally burnt black by his inability to separate them at all.

And those two, they flicker and shimmer and shine on for one another. They move like ironic mirror images, a forward, and a backward, a left hand, then a right hand, a shadow, a flicker, a kissin the corridor - and maybe, someday, they could even be more than that.


	14. albuslucy

for vanity sinning - as promised_. _:)_  
><em>

* * *

><p><em>kissing cousins<em>

"you smiled at me  
>and i saw you differently"<br>i'm gonna love you, hunchback of notre dame II

Albus sings with light in his eyes, squinting against the glare as his thrumming voice soars. The sunset leaves a sinful sheen against his skin, and when he sends a secret smile her way, something that feels sun-kissed presses against her heart.

The end of the celebrations go hand in hand with copious Firewhiskey, and it is so easy to pretend that is the only thing lending the subtle weight to their every glance.

"I wrote that song for you." he says later, grinning, some long-lost firefly glimmer in his green eyes. And Lucy can't imagine how he thinks she didn't know - every beat between _angels_ and _goodbye _pulses with the unspoken echo of her name.

The next morning, picking him out of the crowd at the airport is almost as painful as it is a gift. His eyes are mournful, liquid, terribly sad. He throws his arms around her with the rest of her cousins, but when he leans close to her ear, he doesn't say goodbye.

"You're not sorry." He whispers.

Except she is.


	15. lilylouis

a sort of sequel to my other LilyLouis: _this house of stars and sky. _I hope it makes sense without it, too, though.

* * *

><p><em>kissing cousins<em>

"i hold my breath and lose the feeling  
>that i'm on my own."<br>smother me, the used

The hill behind the house is as stark as ever, pristine and alone. Lily tugs him back with a secret smile, and Louis has lost every ability to say no to her already.

"I wish it was raining." she tells him, leaning against his chest. He absently curls a reddish tangle around his finger.

"You would be dancing if it were."

He senses her smile in the stretch of her cheek against his.

"Yeah." she says, "I would be." For once, though, there's nothing but sun - the only clouds are in the clear, blue sky of Lily's eyes.

"I'm leaving." she tells him, "I can't stay here. Not like this." He thinks of this, of how they are tangled around one another, how he can feel her every breath with his hands._ Not like this_, he hears again,_ not without you_.

"Where should I go?" she asks, turning slightly to look at him.

His eyes are honest. "I don't know." he tells her. Lily is the dreamer; she dances in the spaces between the raindrops. Louis is a pragmatist, a Ravenclaw, a hard-eyed realist with no space to dance in.

He shuts his eyes and kisses the skin of her shoulder.

"We can go anywhere." he whispers.


	16. lucyrose

_kissing cousins_

Ever since they were young, Lucy had fixed Rose's hair.

Molly was much too old, and Lily was too busy wrestling with Roxanne. Dominique and Victoire were too close to one another to offer, so soft, silent Lucy was the only one who had the patience to brush Rose's auburn hair to burnished copper.

Then Rose burst into adolescence, blossoming into a miracle of pink cheeks and red hair, stunned and stunning as she passed through the flower-lined path of her own possibilities.

Stumblingly, hesitantly, Lucy followed, eternally two years behind, now a shoot, a leaf, a faint green stem, fragile, bending, petals drooping to kiss the ground where Rose bloomed.

And Lorcan blossomed up into the light with her, swept merry Rose into sun and away from shadows, and there was nothing but Lucy left in the dark, muted light of the church's lobby, twining Rose's elegant curls around her fingers, the wan smile affixed to her face almost as firmly as she herself was affixed by Rose's stony, unforgiving gaze.

Blinking painfully against the weight of her heart in her throat, she lifted up a trailing strand in her fingers. Pausing for breath, she suddenly pressed her mouth to the creamy, freckled skin beneath.

Rose sat through it as if it was just an errant curl moving against the white and lace of her wedding gown, a whisper of air on her skin, a touch of nothing, really, at all.


	17. hugofred

_kissing cousins_

Fred sets things on fire, catches Hugo's eyes with his flames.

He dances and shines, whipping his flames into shallow eddies, curling about Hugo's feet, preening, showing off, never forgetting to shoot back a knowing look.

Fred is a Gryffindor, and fire, flames, excelling, being the brightest in the sky - this all he knows of catching people's eye.

But Hugo is a Hufflepuff, Hugo is a watcher and a smiler and a hugger.

Hugo is all yellow and buttercups and lopsided cakes, and Hugo isn't the one who needs to be seen - Hugo is the one who keeps an eye out for every ordinary miracle, every accidental wonder in the world, and Hugo, personally, wonders how Fred hasn't realized that he catches Hugo's eye every day.

Every minute.


	18. roxannelucy

_kissing cousins_

_You can take the city out of a girl, but you can't take a girl out of the city. _Roxanne thinks, grinning wryly. She holds a gloved hand out to catch a snowflake falling among the fierce glower of the skyscrapers, and only briefly imagines the longer, slim-fingered one that should be cupped around it.

It's remarkably boring here. However excited she'd been once, she's realized there are things more beautiful then ice blooming on windowpanes, things warmer than other people's winters.

Inside the lab, she sits and listens to the instructor drone on about Potions catalysts and non-reactive ingredients, and thinks of a slim volume tapping against a robe-clad leg.

_Shakespeare wrote sonnets, too, you know, _murmurs an irritable voice in her head. _Two more months, _she tells herself.

Somewhere, a hundred, a million miles away, a dark-haired girl is tasting the virgin continents of a dead man's love songs. If things were better, if things were _right, _Roxanne might feel them pressed against the back of her neck.


	19. albusmolly

_kissing cousins_

Something in Molly is untouchable.

There's a stinging condescension in her eyes, in the way her mouth curls at the edge of her cigarette, the way her gaze takes in her cousins and passes over them without lifting even one of them away from the crowd.

Not even Al, who yearns for her gaze like it's water, and he is dying.

_(Sometimes, he wonders what would happen if he chased after her, begged her to look at him, all full with his wild longing, brimming with his peculiar melodic desperation as he does.)_

They are standing in the kitchen one day - not even that - Molly is gliding in, Albus is waiting for Mum to return, and when her gaze slips through him and past him again, he can't hold back the question that is eating him away.

"Do you really hate me that much?" _Can't you even look at me? Is it - Am I that disgusting?_

But these are questions she can only hear in his voice, or read in his eyes, and Al wonders if that's what makes her turn back to him.

And look. And finally look at him. Something in her blue eyes clears, something blurs, and Al is transfixed in the spotlight glare of her eyes, those eyes which finally separate him from the scene around him, pierce him and strip him, and rub away his flesh to bone.

And, poised on the edge of that silver-lipped awakening, Molly looks at him and says, "Hey, Al."

_(He could throw songs at her shadow till morning, and she wouldn't even look round.)_


	20. mollyfred

_kissing cousins  
><em>

The only thing they have in common is that they're both the second ones –Fred Jr., after his dad, and Molly, after her grandmom.

She's three years older, sharp-tongued and secretly, bitterly, angry about some cosmic slight she can't remember.

He's three years younger, nervous, lanky, and he's called her Mollytoo since he was young enough to get confused between her and Grandma.

They're friends, and sometimes, no one understands that.

They're cousins, and sometimes they forget that.

They're waiting for something, and sometimes, when Freddy wins a laugh out of her with his determined, awkward sense of humour, and her raging knowledge of _wrongness _in the world vanishes for a minute, it seems a little closer than it was yesterday.


	21. roseroxanne

_kissing cousins  
><em>

They sit on opposite sides of the poetry carousel in the library, waging a silent war over who gets the volume of sonnets.

The battle is in deadly earnest – a hand, pale, ink-splattered, be-ringed fingers slowly creeping along the metal edges of the cart as the other perches just beyond the crest of books, lithe and spare and dark - some ancient spiderlike predator, seeking its prey by scent alone.

There is a feigned nonchalance in the one-two-one-two beat of their glances, sometimes checking the progress of the other hand, sometimes landing on the other face or perusing the title of the book covering it. Sometimes noting the blue eyes – how unusually familiar, the blue eyes.

Always the hands, waiting to dart forth.

Always the eyes, flicking back to their own books, in the end.


	22. dominiquerose

_kissing cousins  
><em>

"It's got to be the _song_ in me."

That's how Dom describes it.

Rose is briefly surprised by the passion in her voice, by the poetry of the words – and then is puzzled by them. She's got nothing against poetry – in fact, she loves it, has volumes and volumes bound up and stored on her bookshelves, but to describe her career choice?

Rose is practical.

Rose likes things to be sensible, and so she hopes, kindly, that Dom forgets all about this dragons nonsense, and fails to notice that not even the sight of those magnificent silhouettes thrown up against the sun deepens the colour in Dom's eyes as much as the sight of Rose, herself.


	23. albushugo

_kissing cousins  
><em>

Al is simple. Easy. If there was a single word for what the summer was, for the heavy lingering sweetness of the air or how thes yellow of the sun swam in the sky's blue, that would be the word for what it's like, sitting next to him, and knowing that they've got nothing hiding between them but whatever hides in the grass.

He smiles at Hugo, and for Hugo, who smiles, but with a secret weighing down the left corner, Al's smile is a promise,'light and free as the wind, that nothing Hugo tells him will ever be a surprise, will never be anything but a truth as plain as the song of a bird or the rain.

So Hugo tells Al his last secret. And Al, Al cocks his head and smiles.


	24. hugodominique

_kissing cousins  
><em>

There are a lot of things they do together.

This must be the saddest one he thinks. His voice is barely more than a whisper, off-key, out of tune, but she still lies trapped beneath it, the sharp lines of her body coiled like harp strings, thrilling as though to his touch.

He's just a nice boy - the only nice boy, to be honest - the only one who's been there to hold her hand.

He sings until the tension slips away from her skin, and stands to slip away himself.

"Hugo." she says, and when he turns, it is into the entangling, cobwebby gray-green of her left eye, peering at him from beneath the hand she clamps around his wrist.

"Hugo," she says again, "Sing me to sleep." Sitting again beside her, he ignores the swimming desire in her eyes, the swelling relief buried behind their pellucid shimmer. Ignores the latent desperation in her touch.

Beginning his sorry song again, Hugo thinks that if he could ever love a girl, she would be it.


	25. fredlucy

_kissing cousins  
><em>

He makes her want to throw herself gloriously into, be swallowed and destroyed by, be hollowed and emptied of.

She never can quite finish the sentence, decide what exactly it is she wants to be swallowed, hollowed, thrown by – there is only the furious weight of feeling she carries for him; _a prepositional love, if you will,_ she tells her mind.

A love of prepositions, of hypotheses and theories and attempts.

A love from the darkest corner of the library, where she can turn away, turn into, turn about should his sparkling gaze ever find her out.


	26. lucyvictoire

_kissing cousins  
><em>

_Analysis_, a noun meaning _the __separation of a whole into its component parts_.

This is Lucy's most specialized skill, and so she files away the eyes under _periwinkle blue, almond-shaped, lashes long _and the nose under _straight, pointed, Grecian, _the mouth under _pink, soft, full, Cupid's bow _and the face under _heart-shaped_.

The skin, she files under _smooth, pale, warm, freckled (see: freckles), _the hands under _expressive, fine, blue-veined, elegant._

She catalogues each feature carefully, making it impersonal, hiding away the beauty behind a veil of words, hiding the truth of what she sees - eyes blue as sky in the sunlight, deep as water in the dark, mouth falling open in a laugh, hands fluttering as she explains a concept again – within the truth of what everyone else does.

_(Freckles _are listed as _brownish, found on nose, cheeks, hands, knees, neck, shoulders. Trail down back in meandering path. Form three different identifiable constellations on her hands, look like field of flowers on her throat, curl about her hips in a spray of stars.)_


	27. lilymolly

_kissing cousins  
><em>

Lily has always wanted to grow up into Molly.

Not like her, not as her. Into her.

Lily wants to curl the tendons of her arm into the places where Molly's belong, wants to tangle strands of her hair into the sharp, matching red of Molly's.

Lily wants to swirl her feet into the impressions that Molly leaves behind and watch the flowery pink of her mouth be pressed in to Molly's reddish smirk. Lily wants to turn her eyes into the clarion call of Molly's blue, to scatter shadows from her eyelids like Molly does.

Lily wants to match the curve of her spine to the elegant swoon of Molly's, to trail the bloodstained truth of the world from her fingers, to dance beneath the eyes of the world with a secret or a cigarette poised between her teeth.


	28. jameslucy

_kissing cousins  
><em>

She sometimes hates the idea that he grew up so sweet. Part of her remembers - and is really not ready to forget - him ten years ago, when he still thought he was invincible, and that people were supposed to fall at his feet.

It's that part of her that looks for some curl of casual cruelty in his gaze, for the pointed smirk that would reveal this for the joke it is – the evidence proving that the fine cracks that have cut away that wild arrogance are only temporary.

But James is kind, and careful, and edges gingerly around broken people with the concern of someone who has shattered and only slowly put back together.

He touches his hand to her face like she is precious and fragile and might vanish if he hurries, and what that part of Lucy hates most is that she can't just fix him with a kiss.


	29. victoirehugo

_kissing cousins  
><em>

She can't stop seeing him as the same curly-haired little boy, the adoring tilt of his head at three and a half, the satisfied curve of his dimpled smile.

There was a time when he sought her out with an ecstatic screech, when he flung his tiny, grasping hands around her with a wild, frantic joy, and blubbered at her with cheery abandon.

Hugo loved her, once.

But Hugo's all grown up, now, and watching him blink nervously and shy away from her touch stings in a way she never expected.


	30. roxannelily

_kissing cousins  
><em>

They don't match, at all.

Lily covers her skin in make-up, emerald green, poppy red, rosy pink. Roxanne lets the smoky darkness of her skin speak for itself, covers up nothing, hides nothing.

Roxanne's eyes are night-blue, and Lily's the cloudless blue of the sky in summer.

Lily luxuriates in the broken-glass darkness of the streets at night, and Roxanne is up at the crack of dawn.

Roxanne draws the scents of food into the kitchen with the skill of her grandmother; Lily burns toast.

The only thing they have in common is a certain arrogant, fragile tilt to their heads; the only place it vanishes is when they tangle their fingers together, and bury those proud heads in one another's shoulders.


	31. dominiquemolly

_kissing cousins_

Too similar, and too different. It's everywhere – it's something about the way they fight the world, the way they look at each other and see the undercurrent of need, of fear and freedom, and the way their hearts beat to the sound of nothing but their blood in their ears. Dom with the latent fierceness in her eyes, and Molly, her clamped teeth carrying a hint of a snarl around her cigarette.

But it's also tangled somewhere in the way green sets off Molly's eyes, and red matches the lowlights in Dom's hair, in the way that one of them will gain their wings, and one will tumble into the sea, and staring at each other, seeing the depths of that need in each other turns it into almost a competition, a struggle for flight.

Too similar and too different. Their problem is that they understand each other far too well to fall in love.


	32. lilyfred

_kissing cousins  
><em>

She's got the fiercest twinkle in her eye, and when she turns it on him, it spears him like lightning.

There's something too bright about her – like steel untempered, heated to the point it nearly shatters or bends, or whatever it is steel does when it's pushed to its breaking point.

And, Fred, god_damn_ his stupid instincts, can never stray far from the threat of an explosion.

And so he hovers around the sketched out ruin she nearly is, and drinks in the charred ash buried in the shadows of her face and beneath her eyes, and he tells himself he is watching out for her, when all he does is just watch her.

Watch her, and wait for that sweet explosion to burn him, to wreck him to the ground.


	33. jameslouis

_kissing cousins_

It's all down to the fucking bike.

Or maybe it's because of that fucking smile.

Maybe it's the fact that there's a stinging kiss buried somewhere between his dimple and the corner of his mouth, and if the bastard hadn't been _shining _it at him through the vivisected frame of the bike, James would be _just – fucking – fine._

And it's not his fault if his replies are getting more short and more spiteful, or if every word is cutting a hurtful furrow in between stupid Louis' eyes, because if James doesn't do something to squash the unruly thrill that grin gives him, he is going to _die_, or burst, or shove the little twat against the door and tear that sparkling kiss right out from between his teeth.


	34. victoirelily

_kissing cousins  
><em>

To the passing viewer, this, what they are, makes no sense.

She's tall, cold, lovely and forbidding, she's short, fierce, stunning – and if she's forbidding, too, it's for the completely other reason.

She's nearly ten years older, the very embodiment of reason, and she's, really, just a child, wild, unrestrained, the far-flung lines of her arm hinting at madness.

Whatever they see in each other, it's not a lesson for somebody else to be taught.

It's not a science experiment, painstakingly mapped out, or a swooping play on the field, to be replayed over and over again by spectators – this is lightning in a jar, and the one thing neither of them will ever deign to do is explain it.


	35. louishugo

_kissing cousins  
><em>

* * *

><p>for lowi, since she has been utterly splendid as a reviewer. i am really sorry about how terrible this is, lovely - consider it an interlude from the angst, i guess?<p>

* * *

><p>For three drunken, tippling weeks, he wants desperately to be in love with Hugo.<p>

It's right after Hugo comes out to them, and Louis is terrified that, now, after everyone has smiled and laughed away his cousin's fears and the secret shadow has been plucked away from his shoulders, Hugo won't need Louis anymore, will leave him behind, will forget him entirely.

So Louis struggles to fall in love with the soft dark curls, and the bright blue eyes, and only succeeds in making himself a little irritable, a little itchy, and giving himself a fierce headache. He confesses to Hugo the next day, and Hugo laughs at him and laughs at him, until Louis gives up, and laughs, too.


	36. victoirealbus

_kissing cousins_

Victoire never laughs, and sometimes, very sometimes, she even forgets to smile.

Albus makes up for it though - he's got bells sewn into the corners of his voice, and they chime loudest when he laughs into the gaps of her silence and fills those crevices whole.

Sometimes, he tempts her into a misbegotten chuckle, and even when she is trying, it never sounds as gentle as his. Victoire can't help how it makes her feel – warm and syrupy tend. Charmed, flattered. Fond.

Albus laughs like laughter could smear her beauty into kindness – kindness like his, as kind as his.


	37. fredjames

_kissing cousins_

James knows a thousand ways to push people away; but Fred only knows one way to keep people close.

It's just that simple, actually.

James is rude, James is cruel, James is unkind, and Fred lets it slick off of his shoulders like rainwater. James throws punches, screams at the wall, hisses between his teeth, and Fred opens his arms for it like it is a gift sliding through his fingers, circling around his wrists.

James doesn't know how to say _Thank you _or_ I love you _so he says "What the fuck are you playing at?" Fred knows how to say both, but all he says is "I know."


	38. lucydominique

_kissing cousins_

Everything is _wrong_ when they come together. They are floating bits of flotsam, pulled out leaves from a weed, chewed up pieces of gum, spat out and stuck to the same abandoned shoe.

The shoe is a lonely table in the Hog's Head, and somehow, sharing the tumbled ruin of the castles where they hid their dreams is enough of a cure to make it a little better.

And even better than that, they are so drunk tonight that they forget to loathe themselves for a minute, and Lucy tells Dom about how lovely her eyes are in the low light.

Dom tells Lucy that when Lucy smiles, a wing gets a star, and Lucy teeters between telling Dom she is too drunk to flirt, and telling Dom that everything about her, from the mussed crown of her fair hair to the darkling shadow beneath her bottom lip is utterly perfect.

And Dom kisses Lucy before she comes to a decision, and tells her everything she needs to hear.


	39. jamesmolly

_kissing cousins_

James would have to explain it to anyone else, but Molly is just as besotted with Granddad and his old Muggle bits and pieces as he is – they both know what happens when you grind together two gears that don't fit. They both understand how it shears off the sharp parts, rubs away the rough patches into smoothness.

It's surprisingly easy to convince themselves that is what they are doing, because they both know how it works: you've got to be cruel to be kind, cruelcruelcruel to be kind, and they can hold one another's cruelty, leave someone else to soak up their kind.

It is an enormously simple way to explain away the furious, shadowy nights.

It's even a surprisingly easy explanation for the proprietary marks of their teeth.


	40. victoirefred

_kissing cousins_

He's not someone who's used to victory – knowing her is enough.

There is a sense of restrained movement in her loveliness, the idea not of flight, but of eternity – if she was cast in marble, it might catch at the edges of her how firm her beauty looks, might show the universe how much she is a fixture of the world to him, how much the lodestone of the seasons turning and the sun rising and the sky spinning.

Fred has never wanted to own her, never wanted to take what is, for him, an entire universe and have it at his side – all he wants to watch the world open and close around her, to watch every cloud parade her likeness into the air.


	41. mollyroxanne

_kissing cousins_

Molly watched her fall. It must have hurt, she thought, but Roxanne made it look like dancing – like kissing the ground, instead of being caught by it, as though she might any moment lift her feet out of its reach and soar.

Molly was the ground in this scenario, she figured, dragging the bright-winged fairy out of the air and into her arms, and being fooled, like everyone else who saw her, into believing that even though she looked half a breath from flight, she'd finally been caught in a net too fine for her to escape.

But even broken-winged and ragged, even earth-smeared and ruined, she was sky-besotted, and in the end, Roxanne always flew.


	42. rosealbus

_kissing cousins_

Everyone knew they were never going to be less than best friends, because everyone saw through the superficial differences of his green eyes and her red glasses, and saw straight to the fervent core of innocence that hammered out his fierce naiveté and her sharp-eyed idealism at once.

They were dreamers, and they sat on the grounds of Hogwarts tangled in golden-red leaves and grass as green as envy, and told each other impossible stories. In winter, they curled into fidgety balls around snuck away cocoa and blankets borrowed with ever-sincere assurances, and made promises they always, always meant to keep.

And then the world that gave them the grass and the snow and the chill in the air yanked the blankets out from under their feet, they still were best friends, and they still dreamed - never alone and always together. Sometimes, when it was dark, they still told each other stories about tomorrow. Sometimes, they still made promises – and these, they sealed with a kiss.


	43. jameshugo

_kissing cousins_

James has a way of implying Hugo is unworthy – it's in the cat-smug tilt of his head, the dismissive catch of his glance. Hugo, as aware of feelings as a hand against his skin, flushes red and struggles to wipe the sneer out of James' every move, only sometimes catching up.

Feeling like every move is against a grinning chessmaster is wearing, though, and Hugo is tired of trying to prove himself to someone he owes nothing to.

Even James can trip up and push too hard, and this time, Hugo turns around and shoves right back – they scrabble on the floor, until Hugo shoves an elbow in James' face and comes out, briefly, on top.

"What is wrong with you? Why are you doing this?" He whispers, hands twined into James shirt. An ugly autumn red is stealing into his cousin's face, and James hisses at him through the flame lined fire escape that is his blackened mouth.

"You…you make it so easy to hate you. You make it so easy."

Hugo feels it like a punch to his gut, a blow that sinks into the quivering knots of his knees, and he sees James catch sight of the moment of weakness – sees him prepare to sink his teeth into the hole he's dug in Hugo's heart, so Hugo kisses him first, because even if it makes him sick, it still feels like winning.


	44. hugolucy

_kissing cousins_

They can tell that she intends to brood all night, and the others, being the splendid, good-hearted cousins they are, have no intention of leaving her to it.

So they cheerfully shove Hugo at her, because if Molly is scary, and Rose is terrifying, Lucy's absolutely unearthly when she is in a mood, and there are frequent reports of permanent injuries when she accosts unsuspecting passerby.

Nobody's actually sure why she tolerates Hugo and Hugo alone (because Hugo keeps her uncharacteristic weakness for his cream puffs a secret) and when reasons are tossed out, they assume she is just as charmed by his tremulous dimple as the rest of the world.

Hugo carries a plastic tin of cream puffs up to Lucy's attic hideout, and Lucy is as helplessly drawn to them as ever. He leans a chin on her shoulder, and relentlessly _hmm_s and _okay_s the story out of her. As usual, they trade barbs about Muggle shows none of their cousins have seen while Hugo pretends to fight Lucy for the last cream puff, and when he lets her have it (again), Lucy loses the latest in a long line of battles to his tremulous dimple, and beams.


	45. fredlouis

_kissing cousins_

They are working on the logistics of it – the logistics of one another, of fitting into the uncurved halves that they accidentally-but-not-really-quite leave open for one another. It takes work, actually, Fred reaching as far as his arm will go, and Louis finishing the remaining half-a-foot to the novel; Louis leaning backwards, and Fred catching his head in a pillow.

Sometimes they still get it wrong, and Fred is a thrifty, rain-clogged twilight, and Louis is a muggy, cloud-filled sunrise in the morning.

Sometimes they get it right, and they are the summer, distilled, swirled in a glass, and left to shine.


	46. lilylucy

(prompts: the NGF Prompts, oh, Prompts thread: May 13th)

_kissing cousins_

_"_you're going away  
>and i'm feeling the same thing<br>day after day_"_  
>-xavia, the submarines<p>

Lily never talked in dewdrops or rainbows or the wind over the trees. This is a girl who was all teeth, all hard heart and heavy hands and calculating fingernails, all desperate and fighting to hide whatever left her empty under the marks she leaves with her hands. It's hard to believe that Lucy could look at this – this mirage, this half-formed liongirl, fading in and out of focus as she searches for herself – and see something to want at all.

But standing that close to something so primal, someone so barely contained, involves an attraction impossible to fight – a gravitational field that's too hard to break out of. Lucy can drag her maturity and thoughtfulness and her rationality as far over the sea as she likes, but all it takes is the shine of teeth in the lowlight, or the click of fingernails across a guitar to drag that fierce memory into wakefulness.

(and Lucy can pretend as much as she likes, but that Lily will always be an illusion too false, too far to reach, no matter what the distance in miles.)


	47. louisalbus

_kissing cousins_

It's a little inevitable that they were both going to smile at one another just right someday.

Today is three days before that day; today, Al sings a song, and Louis beams at the grass between his hands, and Al looks up in time to watch his lips whisper shut over its dainty ankles.

Today, when they bump themselves inside for a drink or a snack or whatever they're ransacking the house for, Al sniggers at Louis' monologue about the mustard, and shoots a grin at the exposed skin of his elbow four seconds before Louis can turn all the way back around and see it.

Today, their hands brush only a second too long when they go for the bread on the high shelf, and they shoot overlapping smiles at the cupboard before they jump back.

Today, that day is close enough to bite, hidden in a blue-grey shadow, sliding sweetly onto the road just beyond the bend, but, today, that day is still not here.


	48. freddominique

_kissing cousins_

She's gotten so good at pushing people away that she's nearly forgotten how hard it is. How, despite her efforts, parts of them will still slot neatly into place with parts of her, soothe her and hold her, cradle her and comfort her even as her angry independence tries to fight its way free - how the problem is really her fear - fear of being smothered, swallowed up by other people. How she is so afraid, that she will let herself become wrapped in someone to the point where there will be nothing left of her, all of her sharp points and spars weathered into a little piece of someone else.

She's never said this to him, never even admitted to herself that she wants to. The fact that he still comes back to her is almost too painful to forgive.


	49. rosevictoire

_kissing cousins_

Rose always holds her hand.

It's hard to describe why that feels so important - perhaps because something about Victoire seems to make people nervous about touching her. As though she was some sort of Renaissance statue, carved from marble by the hands of a master, and a touch would rub away the details which made her seem so real - so lifelike. As though she was not entirely human, and she didn't desire to be touched.

But Rose has never seen anything in Victoire, except for what Victoire needs her to see, and Rose smiles at her with a careless abandon which skims over her face and ends on her hands, before she cups them in her own.

Someone who can do that, Victoire thinks, that is someone worth keeping


	50. roxannedominique

_kissing cousins_

"You can't keep doing this to yourself." Dom says to her.

"You're one to talk." Roxie murmurs.

"I am," Dom responds, dragging a lonely finger against her palm, "Trust me."

"Well, I don't." Roxie scoffs, and Dom pinches her hand sharply, talking over the loud gasp she elicits from Roxanne.

"You should." Dom tells her fiercely. "You should trust me, because I know exactly what it feels like - "

"What what feels like?" Roxie scoffs back at her, slightly elated at the chance to score a point in return for the pinch, "You barely have feelings."

"I do." Dom whispers, quietly, turning the clear night's-blue of her eyes on Roxanne. "I - I know what it's like to love someone who doesn't look back at you."


	51. albusfred

_kissing cousins_

Surprise is hardly a strong enough reaction to describe Lily's reaction when she comes across Fred and Albus facing off across a broken houseplant, flinging insults at one another with the quiet intensity that has seemed so gentle until now. It might be even harder to find the word to describe how everyone else feels when it keeps happening.

Awkwardly, uncomfortably, it seems it's somehow the two of them, the sweet ones, the nice ones, who rub wrinkles into one another's calm.

It's almost impossible to make sense of - on the average day, around anyone else, they have barely enough cruelty to leave an unkind word lingering anywhere near their mouths - but what Lily can't see is that even kindness comes with a price - curbed back words and unspoken wishes and hidden desires. Some of these things they can spit out to each other in the mornings, and some they save for the night.


	52. louisrose

_kissing cousins_

She doesn't look at him; he can understand why - she might not have enough time for him any more, how other people might have moved into the spaces in her life he thought he would fill - but some part of him is still waiting for the crescent curve of her face from the side to wax into the moon of her smile, gleaming for him.

He doesn't look away from her. From the corner of her eye, Rose is aware of the way he moves in sync with her, orbiting in her shadow. Just once, she wishes he would move out of shadow, slide into the spaces in her life only he has ever owned, holes that she has been forced to plug with pieces from other people. Just once, she wishes he would turn to her in the light, and she would give back to him the smile she has kept close to herself, the smile she has saved just for him.


	53. mollyrose

_kissing cousins_

Two girls are lying on the grass and they are shapes in the ground with red hair and brown hair, shapes which don't move, don't move until one shape opens her mouth to speak.

"Lie to me." she says at last, because she feels like she has ruined things beyond repair and things are swimming into her head, and the world is too big and too angry and too hurt and she is so lonely in the middle of it.

And the other girl does - tells her stories where things are sharp and clean and easy and the corner of the world where her lies exist is entirety of the world, where her lies cover up the ugly angry parts and slip a sugar-sweet spiral into the air and whisper that it's okay to be lonely, it's okay, it's okay. In the middle she reaches for her cousin's smaller hand and lies her way right into her thudding heart. 


	54. victoireroxanne

_kissing cousins_

You knew you would make mistakes. It never occurred to you that one of them would be her, the way her sooty cloud of hair would stain your fingers dark as her eyes, that the touch of her mouth would set you free.

What would you have done if it had?

Would you have built your prisoner's tower higher? Tried harder to build a fortress in the clouds, out of the clouds? But everyone knows your castle walls are spun from cotton candy. It would have taken one earth-dampened look and all of your towers would have floated away.


	55. hugolily

_kissing cousins_

Lily hates them all. All of them. It's like, she knows that it's unreasonable, and sort of unfair, but actually coming out and admitting that to herself would make everything else she's lying to herself about true as well, and that is too much honesty for her to take all at once.

So, yes, it's easier to pretend that every stupid twat Hugo makes eyes at is actually a godawful harpy, or whiny, or stupid, or, or basically not good enough for him, for her gentle cousin and his woodlark eyes, for his sparrow-sweet soul. There is something corrosive and hurtful in the truth, and the fact of it, that it isn't her, that it will never, never be her, is too much for her to take.


	56. roxannelouis

_kissing cousins_

You can't keep a beautiful boy locked up. You can't hold down his pretty hands or his blue glass gaze and you can't keep it from rippling up your legs and into the dimples of your spine.

You say no, because it's you and it's him, and you know he will listen to you.

You say no, because you know that both he and you are frightened by the next move, by what comes after the eyes and your spine.

(You say no, because somewhere, you know, if you weren't you, and he wasn't him, what you would say would be yes.)


	57. mollyhugo

a/n: Oh my gosh. It's taken me an entire year, and then some, but this is it. I've written every single possible cousincest pairing, and this is my final drabble for this story. It's been an incredibly entertaining and challenging experiment, and I could not have done it without each and everyone of my extraordinary reviewers. Without you, I could not have sustained the motivation I needed to complete this drabble collection, and I mean it from the bottom of my heart. Special adoration to Lovisa, Blueberry, and Hadleyface for giving me such lovely comments and such immense inspiration. Mucho loving to all the brilliant people who gave me prompts and pairing requests, too - I hope you enjoyed the drabbles I dedicated to you, as well!

* * *

><p><em>kissing cousins<em>

It's supposed to be a joke - he's nearly seven years younger than her, after all, and she can't help but be charmed when a serious pair of eight-year-old brown eyes, barely high enough to clear the table, insist on pulling out her chair for her because it's "chi-walrus." The way those serious eyes brighten and a deep dimple takes over his freckled face when she calls him "Sir Knight" is enough to keep her doing it.

But at some point her wide-eyed savior grows tall enough to see over the table, taller even than her. His dimple settles into the side of his mouth like a secret song, just for her, and by the time she realizes that their "Milord" and "Milady"s have taken on the tang of an old world tragedy, it's too late to be rescued by her knight.


End file.
